Friday, October 11, 2013

Meet the other farmers of the future

The organic farm-fresh 100 mile crowd will be feeding families and maybe even a few neighbourhoods, but it'll be the Monsanto ADM crowd that feeds the masses.

I was just talking this over with the Farm Manager, and she agrees that most of the farm managers of the future will be Mexicans.

Here's how it's gonna shake out.

We know most of the quality crop-land all over Canada and the US is being bought up by hedge funds. At the moment, a lot of this land is leased back to the farmers who once owned it.

That makes them, when you get right down to it, employees.

As employees, they've got that spoiled North American attitude that their work should provide them with a decent standard of living.

The hedgies will only put up with this cheek for so long. Then we'll see a major move towards both Mexican farm labour and Mexican farm managers.

Mexicans understand that they're lucky to make minimum wage.

When you understand that you're lucky to have a wage of any kind, you're not gonna be giving the boss a lot of trouble.

So here's the farm of the big-ag future.

Some white male sharpie who runs a million acre farm in Saskatchewan or Arkansas or both out of his home office in Connecticut is going to realize that bringing in farm managers at minimum wage from Mexico is gonna solve a lot of problems.

We've had Mexican farm labour here for years; Mexican management is just the next logical step.

Those big-ag guys are busy as busy can be filling out those H-2A and TFW applications at this very moment.